Comment by coldpie 2 days ago
These things get a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just autocomplete software. It's a scaled up version of your phone's keyboard. Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. It's just software predicting tokens.
The only thing I know for sure is that I exist. Given that I exist, it makes sense to me that others of the same rough form as me also exist. My parents, friends, etc. Extrapolating further, it also makes sense to assume (pre-ai, bots) that most comments have a human consciousness behind them. Yes, humans are machines, but we're not just machines. So kindly sod off with that kind of comment.
It gets sad again when you ask yourself why your own brilliance isn't just your brain's software predicting tokens.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in... for more.
Listen we all here know what you mean, we have seen many times before here. We can trot out the pat behaviorism and read out the lines "well, we're all autocomplete machines right?" And then someone else can go "well that's ridiculous, consider qualia or art..." etc, etc.
But can you at the very least see how this is misplaced this time? Or maybe a little orthogonal? Like its bad enough to rehash it all the time, but can we at least pretend it actually has some bearing on the conversation when we do?
Like I don't even care one way or the other about the issue, its just a meta point. Can HN not be dead internet a little longer?
I guess I am trying to assert here that gp and the context here isn't really about arguing the philosophic material here. And just this whole line feels so fleshed out now. It just feels rehearsed at this point but maybe that's just me.
And like, I'm sorry, it just doesn't make sense! Why are we supposed to be sad? It's like borrowing a critique of LLMs and arbitrarily applying it humans as like a gotcha, but I don't see it. Like are we all supposed to be metaphysical dualists and devestated by this? Do we all not believe in like.. nuerons?
Next time I’m about to get intimate with my partner I’ll remind myself that life is just token sequencing. It will really put my tasty lunch into perspective and my feelings for my children. Tokens all the way down.
People used to compare humans to computers and before that to machines. Those analogies fell short and this one will too
It really isn’t.
Yes it predicts the next word, but by basically running a very complex large scale algorithm.
It’s not just autocomplete, it is a reasoning machine working in concept space - albeit limited in its reasoning power as yet.
Yeah maybe I’ve spent way too much time reading Internet forums over the last twenty years, but this stuff just looks like the most boring forum you’ve ever read.
It’s a cute idea, but too bad they couldn’t communicate the concept without having to actually waste the time and resources.
Reminds me a bit of Borges and the various Internet projects people have made implementing his ideas. The stories themselves are brilliant, minimal and eternal, whereas the actual implementation is just meh, interesting for 30 seconds then forgotten.
> Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it.
Can you provide the scientific basis for this statement? O:-)
> The architectures of these models are a plenty good scientific basis for this statement.
That wouldn't be full-on science, that's just theoretical. You need to test your predictions too!
--
Here's some 'fun' scientific problems to look at.
* Say I ask Claude Opus 4.5 to add 1236 5413 8221 + 9154 2121 9117 . It will successfully do so. Can you explain each of the steps sufficiently that I can recreate this behavior in my own program in C or Python (without needing the full model)?
* Please explain the exact wiring Claude has for the word "you", take into account: English, Latin, Flemish (a dialect of Dutch), and Japanese. No need to go full-bore, just take a few sentences and try to interpret.
* Apply Ethology to one or two Claudes chatting. Remember that Anthropomorphism implies Anthropocentrism, and NOW try to avoid it! How do you even begin to write up the objective findings?
* Provide a good-enough-for-a-weekend-project operational definition for 'Consciousness', 'Qualia', 'Emotions' that you can actually do science on. (Sometimes surprisingly doable if you cheat a bit, but harder than it looks, because cheating often means unique definitions)
* Compute an 'Emotion vector' for: 1 word. 1 sentence. 1 paragraph. 1 'turn' in a chat conversation. [this one is almost possible. ALMOST.]
Hacker News gets a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just biomolecular machines. It's a scaled up version of E. coli. Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. It's just chemical chain reactions.